Chucalissa's mayor dies of COVID in the opening moments bringing Andre (Parker Sawyers), the business man with shady intentions who falls for the Pynk's Autumn Night (Elarica Johnson), back to the town. The dancers of the Pynk are financially unstable. Hall plunges the viewers into the thick of the pandemic, shortly before lockdown lifted, but when uncertainty and death was still thick in the air. The return to the real world is jarring, and not just because a man has cum on his dashboard. While drive-through strip experiences were certainly not uncommon in 2020, Pussyland is a production, hypnotic and elaborate, with an infrastructure that looks anything but hastily cobbled together. Vialet, whose cinematography has made P-Valley one of the best and most original looking shows on air.
The opening sequence, set to Jucee Froot's "Distance," is stunning, but it's also intentionally a fantasy, directed by Barbara Brown and shot by Richard J. Because that's just how the show operates, the fact that the show is talking about marginalized communities in this way, about corporate powers taking over whole neighborhoods and whole towns." Hall and her writers have decided to run with this idea, telling a COVID story that for once doesn't feel overly familiar. "However, to be in conversation with what is happening in the world, I think is very important. "At the end of the day, Chucalissa is a fictional town. When P-Valley finished up its fantastic first season, creator Katori Hall, who based the show on her play of the same name, told Thrillist that she was thinking of incorporating the pandemic into the upcoming storyline. It's maybe the horniest COVID has ever been. When it's over he's offered weed wings and a Clorox wipe to clean up his semen. He masturbates as the camera cuts between her dance and his lusting eyes. At the end of his journey there's Mercedes (Brandee Evans) in metallic boots with flaming heels and a cowboy hat.
He pays for the full experience and is led down an X-rated Alice in Wonderland style rabbit hole, a fantasy where he leaves the world of disease and an overcrowded house behind and enters a world of sudsy women lit in neons. It follows a man we the audience have never seen before as he is lured by "Pussyland," a car wash-slash-strip show that The Pynk's proprietors and dancers have set up during COVID lockdown. And yet the second season premiere breaks that tradition, just slightly, to incredible effect.
Though the series chronicles the women who work at The Pynk, an establishment in fictional Chucalissa, Mississippi, it largely ignores leering men who come to view them work the pole. P-Valley, the captivating drama on Starz, usually doesn't focus on the perspective of the average strip club patron.